It's OK to limit friends on Facebook

How do you manage social-media accounts without bruising people's feelings?

How do you manage social-media accounts without bruising people’s feelings?

That’s the question posed by a 50-something reader from California who writes that he was “very reluctant to join Facebook,” but finally did and “must say that I do enjoy it.”

This fellow has tried to manage his friends list by limiting it to those with whom he “had a pleasant association at one time or another.”

Occasionally, however, he receives friend invitations from someone whose name he might recognize but about whom he remembers nothing.

“I do not want to hurt the feelings of anyone,” he writes, “but I also want to keep my friends list limited to those people I at least remember. Is there an answer to this quandary?”

Facebook has grown from a self-reported 1 million users by the end of 2004 to more than 1?b illion users in 2012. With that many people hooked into the site, each of us is bound to know well someone who is on Facebook. We are also bound to have lots of old sort-of acquaintances we don’t recall.

There is nothing unethical about not accepting every friend request that comes our way.

The beauty of social-media sites and free will is that we can choose to keep our circle of connections as small or as large as we desire.

If my reader is curious about those names that seem somewhat familiar, he can simply send a response to the friend request asking the person to remind him how they know one another.

Some requesters might take offense at having to be asked such a question — especially if they remember my reader far better than he remembers them.

But if he decides to accept friend requests only from people he can remember, then the right thing to do is to stick to that rule.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, a lecturer in public policy, directs the communication program at the Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, Mass.